[Eg-oversight-board] Fwd: Evergreen 2013: Register Here for 'Improving Your Collection with Evidence' with collectionHQ

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 10:35 AM, Ben Hyman <ben.hyman at bc.libraries.coop> wrote:
> I indicated to Tony that I didn't think there was a significant threat, and
> that its more of a nuisance of the inappropriate variety at this point.
> Please advise if you feel strongly otherwise.

I lean more towards considering it a nuisance, with two caveats.

Certainly Collection HQ is free to schedule events to take advantage
of there being a concentration of librarians who they think might be
interested in their service.  They are also free to make factual
references to Evergreen 2013 conference insofar as they've scheduled
it at the same time and place.

Here's my first caveat: their signup form
(http://chqeg2013.eventbrite.com/) includes the phrases "Evergreen
2013: Improving Your Collection with Evidence" and "cHQ Session
Evergreen 2013", which taken together could be construed as implying
that their event is part of the conference.  I would prefer that they
not mention the conference in the title of their session, and further
feel that they should be asked to change this on their signup for and
any future promotion of the event.

Hopefully, they'll say yes.  If they don't, we do have the option of
promulgating an announcement to clarify that the Collection HQ session
is not an official part of the conference.  Or, I should so,
promulgating it more broadly than has already been done;
eg-oversight-board is publicly archived, after all.

And here's my second caveat: the email that Collection HQ sent to the
open-ils-general mailing list on the 15th did not much bother me,
personally: it was a one-time email and by proximity to the conference
and content arguably of interest to some Evergreen users.  However,
for obvious reasons, commercial advertising and announcements have to
be watched very carefully; if it becomes more frequent, revisiting the
policy for the mailing lists may be necessary.

What bothers me more are the emails that Collection HQ also sent to
individuals.  If some or all of the email addresses were in fact
harvested from the mailing list archives, it would not be surprising
to find that some members of those lists would object to that.  If
folks do in fact object, there are technical measures that could be
taken to further obscure email addresses in the list archives hosted
on list.evergreen-ils.org.  This wouldn't absolutely prevent
harvesting -- there is nothing we could do that would have that effect
-- but would be a clear signal that the community would not tolerate
that behavior.

Regards,

Galen
--
Galen Charlton
Manager of Implementation
Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts
email:  gmc at esilibrary.com
direct: +1 770-709-5581
cell:   +1 404-984-4366
skype:  gmcharlt
web:    http://www.esilibrary.com/
Supporting Koha and Evergreen: http://koha-community.org &
http://evergreen-ils.org